Dusting off Bones
by Phantomrose96
Summary: Dead children are buried in the King's garden. Guilt is making Asgore lose his grip. There's no backing down from the slaughter, but maybe some magic can put a human's life back in their cold bones. That's the hope at least, to resurrect dead children with nothing but their bones...
1. Chapter 1

Asgore skimmed a finger along the rim of his teacup. Steam sopped into the pads of his paw, wet, slick, but not wholly unpleasant. He drew his hand away and wiped it on his collar, drying his paws before the condensation turned cold. The tea itself was still too hot; there was no use burning his tongue when he had so much time. He'd give it a minute or two more to cool.

 _Thock._

His ears tensed. The single loud noise beat against the kitchen door. It was like a knock, but sharper and thinner than the rapping of knuckles. Asgore drew a breath in and answered.

"Is that you, Dr. Richter?" he spoke to the empty room.

Silence, for a moment, then the knob swiveled. The door itself scraped against the tiling with stammering, chalky beats. It finally got stuck one third of the way open, and Asgore's visitor gave up trying to push it further.

A bent neck appeared at the door's opening. It curved around to a small head and a sharp beak, which was clenched around the bronze knob. The monster unclamped his beak and flipped his head right-side up. The motion was fluid, like the slithering of a snake. The rest of his movements were carried out with staggered jerks and punctuated clicks as claws made contact with the kitchen tiling.

"I pray I'm not interrupting much, Your Highness." The ibis spoke in a staccato beat to match his gait. The few remaining black feathers along his neck puffed as he shook his head. A white coat concealed the rest of his needly frame. It held tight to the bird's body by the thick rumpled wings he kept clamped at his sides.

"You're not interrupting much at all." Asgore braced his paws to the side of his chair. Its legs scraped against the floor as he pushed himself standing. Asgore shifted his attention from the bird to the glass cabinets at his right. His arm swept out to display them. "Might I offer you something from the shelves? I got in a new earl gray from a small place in Waterfall. I'm quite partial to it, especially with some honey. Let me brew you—"

Asgore fell silent at the shivering sound of lab coat shifting against lab coat. Richter had raised one enormous feathered wing in dismissal. He shook his small, bony head. "Tea's not—well, not my cup of tea. I've had enough caffeine today. Rattles my feathers if I drink too much."

A moment of silence settled between them. Asgore redirected his attention to the three-legged stool tucked beneath the counter. He paced the distance, then grabbed it in a single paw. "I apologize that there's not more seating in here. Come, sit, let's chat about—"

"Where've you put the human skeletons?"

The stool dropped from Asgore's hand. It clattered, rolled a few inches, before resting with the brim of the seat and two of its legs propped against the floor. Asgore looked at it with no interest in retrieving it.

"You sure do interrupt a lot for someone who's talking to the King." He tilted just a fraction, glancing back to Richter from the corners of his eyes. "I'm being hospitable."

Richter swept into a low bow. His beak clacked against the floor, one wing spread entirely across his chest. "Sorry, Your Highness. Please don't mistake my bluntness for rudeness. I'm busy, and I value my time."

Asgore moved back to his seat, his body hanging heavier than it had a moment ago. He didn't bother pushing his chair back against the table as he fell into it. His eyes lingered only on the teacup, still wafting out silent steam.

"What do you plan to do with the humans?"

"I have a theory about their skeletal integrity. I wanted to do some analysis."

"And this is…your own project?" Asgore asked with a hint of disapproval.

"Oh, my apologies. I'll return to the project you assigned me—as soon as it exists." Richter pulled himself out of his bow. He matched Asgore's disapproval with a spark of disdain. "By all means, order me to return to doing nothing. It's been exhilarating."

"Are you unhappy with your position as the Royal Scientist, Dr. Richter?"

Richter shrugged. The coat ruffled up around his stringy, plucked neck. "Malcontent. The position is not much of an honor when it is in name only."

"I have a lot of responsibilities, Richter. I have not been snubbing you."

Richter gestured to the table, coat shivering once more. "Many responsibilities, yes. I'm second-rate to imported teas, it seems."

This evoked a near-silent snarl from Asgore. Richter hopped backwards at the warning noise. "Please excuse my bluntness," Richter followed up.

Asgore collapsed back in on himself. He didn't face Richter. "You're an unpleasant person, Richter. Excuse my bluntness."

"Fair enough."

Asgore crouched in, watching his tea cup intently. Richter still hovered by the door. He hopped from one foot to the other in mild agitation. If he understood his non-verbal dismissal, Richter did not act on it. He let the tension draw itself out, long and thin.

"I've…buried the humans out in the garden. There are four marked patches. The most recent is covered just in dirt."

Richter clacked his beak. He let out a small disgusted honk. Asgore looked up, confusion widening his watery eyes as Richter hopped faster.

"You _buried_ them? For god's sakes man, why?"

"It's tradition for humans," Asgore answered on the defensive. "I do it to honor their rituals."

Richter stopped his jumping. He bobbed his head twice and ruffled his feathers. "That…makes sense, from their perspective. It wouldn't be manageable if humans just left their dead lying about." Richter nodded to himself. "Grim reminders, bad for morale, not to mention unhygienic. I've heard dead humans invite disease as they decompose."

Asgore looked on with fresh eyes. He forgot his distaste as something like fear edged into his voice. His fur sopped in the hot tea as he leaned forward. "Decompose?" Asgore stood once more, moving now toward Richter. "No. Human bodies hold their structure after they die. I can promise you this. They don't look any different after they die. They just—" Asgore bit down on the thought. "…Only monsters decompose, Dr. Richter. You ought to know that."

Richter met the King's advance with another step backwards, but he shook his head all the while. "You're misinformed. They don't decompose _immediately,_ but humans definitely decompose. It's just slower, and gorier. Their flesh? That doesn't last. It loses its integrity. Little microbial creatures eat away at it. The _bones_ stay, but that is it."

Asgore stopped his approach. Patches of his face, stripped of fur, had gone ashen. He appraised Richter with revulsion. "I've never heard of—I've never assigned you—How do you know this?"

Richter hunched in on himself. He clacked his beak. "Oh…oh, various sources. Human literature. Accounts from monsters who were alive before we were sealed down here. And you…you were… _despondent_ after Chara's death. Someone had to handle their body."

Asgore's eyes darted to Richter like spears. " _Toriel_ took their body."

" _Eventually_ yes. The Queen never liked me. She had issue with me, uh-" The scientist shuffled uncomfortably under Asgore's probing stare. Richter coughed to clear his throat. "But uh, that's not—not what's important. Not at all, no. I'm just interested in the human _skeleton,_ Asgore. It's surprisingly stable. Fascinating how it… _preserves._ Many monsters survive in bodies with far less structure than human bones. You and I are less composed than a simple human skeleton. It's an enigma. A curious one. I want to study the skeletons, or I want to leave, _Your Highness._ "

Asgore pushed himself forward, a sharp, jerking motion that made Richter flutter backwards. "What does that mean? What makes it enigmatic?"

Richter smoothed his feathers back down. His snaking neck tilted away from Asgore. "Oh I shouldn't elaborate. I'm the Royal Scientist—meant only to sit around until the _King_ orders me to a task."

" _Richter._ "

Richter swallowed, twisting his neck inward toward his body as his eyes flitted around. "It uh—from what I gather, a human skeleton is stable. Stable organic matter is the core requirement to hold life, at least by uh…by monster standards. We've done more with less. Flesh matter, plant matter, half our citizens are hardly stable and yet they are clearly _alive._ But humans—they don't survive, _can't_ survive, that way. No far from it. The slightest tear in their body means death; it's odd. They're so much stronger than us. What makes their tie to life so weak?"

Asgore moved in closer. His cape dragged in waves against the floor. His body, thinner than it had been before his declaration of war, still towered high over Richter.

"That's uh…broad picture though, Your Highness. You asked me what the enigma was, and that is it. Just a…philosophical question. What _I_ want to do is simply study the bone st—"

"You think it's odd, Richter, that a human needs to… _die_ …even though their skeleton remains so well-composed…even after their soul is harvested?"

"Well, _yes_. But-"

"Why, then? …Why does it happen? Why do they die, if _you_ think they shouldn't?"

"I never implied-How can I compose an answer with so little information available?! I know nothing about humans. We have their bones— _only_ bones. You're detracting from my point. I want to study their composure, not crack the secrets of human mortality."

Asgore had stopped listening. He heard only the ringing in his ears, the eager, clamoring, clawing wave of excitement climbing in his chest. He grabbed Richter by the wings, who squawked and pinwheeled his twiggy legs against the King's grip.

"You have permission to experiment on the human bodies, Richter. You also have a new assignment by my decree." He set Richter down, who wobbled on shaky unstable legs. Richter worked compulsively to flatten his thin spread of feathers. "If those bones _should_ hold life, _make_ them. I have the human souls already. And I have their bodies, buried out in the garden. I need you to figure out how to put the human _life_ back into the bodies. If monsters can live fulfilling lives without souls, so can these humans. And it would only be temporary—killing them—just a quick sting."

"Oh certainly. Why don't I just switch off gravity for a day while I'm at it!"

"Fast and painless—I've gotten good, Richter. They don't suffer—and then…then you can put them back. Back in their bones." Asgore moved side to side, hands twisting in each other, keeping Richter boxed in all the while. "They could come back. I'd care for them. All of them. They'd be happy here, as monsters. I've done it before, cared for them before—Chara was happy here. We made Chara happy. We could do it again—We could—Tori and I—"

"Your Highness, please, I feel uncomfortably cornered," Richter sputtered. His feathers bristled as they brushed the corner of the room. Asgore leaned over him, unhearing. Thin tears pricked the King's eyes.

"Please do this for me Richter. If you think it's possible, then it is. You're brilliant. I'm sorry you've been bored. It's my fault, it is—I've been so caught up in…I thought I couldn't—I couldn't figure out how I would keep going—it was killing me, Richter. But you—bless you Richter—you've found an answer. You'll figure this out. I haven't felt this much like myself since before—no matter! This is your assignment. I'll…I'll get to the garden. You don't have the strength to unbury them. Allow me. I can face them now if they…if it'll be just a bit longer…I can make it up. I can. It's not too late."

Asgore twisted on his heel. He took to the door. His feet pounded, dense and muted, against the linoleum. He yanked the door open the rest of the way. It let loose a high, hollow shriek, and stuck no more. Down the hallway, the King disappeared. Cape and all.

Richter shivered. He wiped his beak in fast streaks down his feathers, attempting to flatten them. It did little to abate the churning anxiety in his stomach. So he hopped; he hopped and shivered and muttered curses under his breath. And when he stopped, he found himself standing alone in the King's kitchen. Alone, save for the single cup of tea Asgore had left sitting on the table.

Richter leaned over the table. He twitched his neck in the few moments he spared to investigate the tea, then drew away in distaste. The tea was no good any longer. It'd sat too long.

Cold now.

…

..

.

 _Cold._

Richter pressed his wing to the ridges crafted by the child's ribcage. He then drew back with a shudder. Humans were meant to be warm things, and this—well, this wasn't. It was cold as the ground it'd been exhumed from, and felt even colder to the touch. The bones were dense, heavy, dyed with coffee-like stains of dirt and rot, and they sapped up the room's heat without feeling any warmer.

Asgore had dragged the coffin down to the examination room, and he had wrenched the lid off. The splintering crack of wood, the eking snaps of board tearing from board still echoed in Richter's ears. He disliked it immensely—too loud, too dense, too violent. And the scent it left was too strong, the heady, mulchy stink of earth, the choking smell of cold decay. It penetrated every surface, ate into the marble flooring that was now streaked with dirt. Richter wiped his wing along his lab coat and shivered—not so much from the cold. It wasn't his first time handling a dead body. But the walls closed out everything else, the coffin took up so much space, and he could have sworn Chara had felt… _warmer_ when they died.

Richter shook his head to clear it. The bones. Right, the bones. They belonged to third human King Asgore had killed, third out of four so far. This one had put up the least fight, and as a result they'd died the most intact. Time, pressure, and decay had loosened their shape though. The bones scattered along the floor of the casket; their shape was not quite right.

Richter focused on the pieces he could identify with certainty. The skull-he ran a single feathered wing along its temple to feel if this, too, was cold. Still icy, still solid and filthy, save for the deep gaping shadows that hollowed out their eyes and made for contours that Richter's feather slipped into. The jaw bone had fallen off, now resting slack against the side of the casket.

The rest of its bones were…small. Small and dirty and cold. They littered the bottom of the filthy coffin like twigs dropped from trees. Richter started to remove each with care. He laid them out on his table, recreating the creature in the coffin to the best of his ability. _Clack. Clack. Sliiide. Clack._ Bone to metal, bone to metal again. His plucking disturbed the thick layer of dirt that had sifted through the coffin's cracks, the layer that had buried small bones, and swept others away to the odd corners of the casket. They warped the human picture, scattered bits that had once held the child's shape. It made Richter's reconstruction imprecise. It built a child out of guesswork.

The puzzle of bone watched him as it took form on the examination table—a sloppy, disjointed, decrepit thing. It looked for all the world like garbage—gangling legs made from mismatched halves, strange bones placed where they most seemed to belong. Its right arm contained more tiny fragmented bits than the other. Richter felt himself swimming in the ugly certainty that what he'd made was not correct.

He glanced to his mulch-streaked wings. Grains dug into the folds of his feathers, chalked out the bare, plucked regions of his old wings. It dug into him, the cold smell of death. The uncleanly rot. He took to running his beak in a half-manic frenzy over his wings. Wiping clean, wiping clean, even though he still had half a casket to dust off. And—with any luck—three more after that. He squawked a curse to himself and swore he'd forbid the King from ever reburying these wretches.

After thirty seconds though, Richter stopped. He shut his eyes, exhaled, and drew his neck up to full height again. It was filthy work, filthy violent suffocating work. But it was _his_ work, by decree of the King, and he was best to numb himself to it now. He'd done worse. He still had worse to do. A single dirty human corpse wasn't worth working himself up over.

Richter opened his eyes, and surveyed the puzzled-together skeleton on his table. The skull had tilted. Black empty eyes watched him curiously.

"You're not much of a human anymore, are you?" Richter muttered to the reconstruction. He knocked a wing against the table, and the skull lolled to the side. Its eyes, now to the wall, avoided his question. "…I assumed as much."

Richter used his feathers as a duster, and swept the dirt away from another stark white nub in the coffin. He plucked out a tiny bone, examined it, looked to the skeleton, then tossed the little bone into his metal discard bowl. It hit the brim with a _clack_ and settled to the center. Destined for the garbage, as the whole thing seemed.

Richter exhumed another tiny fragment, and this one he tossed to the discard bowl as well. Because his guesswork stood little chance of finding the right anatomical fix for it; he'd done enough guessing already. And it wouldn't matter either way if he did. This human had been stripped of so much already—a missing bone or two was nothing to a thing without organs, without tissue, without a mind, without a soul.

"I speak too much for my own good. I could have left the King to his moping. Yes, I could have gone on with my marigold experiments (awful, boring things). I've created a strain that grows twice as tall, twice as fast. Wonderful for Asgore's garden." Richter hopped to the other side of the body. He clamped a wing to the skull and tilted it until it faced the ceiling. "I could have quit! I'm old; I've done enough work. I could have made good on my threat and left. Now I've got his hopes up. Now you're the only thing keeping him out of despair."

He moved with bobbing steps to the door. His coat trailed, swimming about his stocky legs. Richter spared a glance backwards. "I have just a few pieces of a long-dead human. The King won't be satisfied until I shackle a life to you. Wretched thing you are, what sort of life could you have? Not a human one, not a true one. I fear I'll turn you into something ghastly, human."

Richter paused, squawked a laugh and ruffled his feathers. "Oh yes, I'm attempting to drag your life back from death, and I do not even know your name. What do I call you? Skeleton? Creature? Child? Ghastly, ghastly thing I'm forced to make."

He hooked his beak around the doorknob. The door eased open, and Richter welcomed the blast of anti-septic laced air that burst through. The bones rustled with the breeze.

" _Ghastly…_ " Richter huffed. He turned, and clicked the lights off in the examination room. "I'm taking my leave for tonight, skeleton. No, not skeleton—I have a name for you. Unless you have a better name to tell me in the future."

He moved to shut the door, and found the skull had tilted once more in his direction. Watching, with hollow eyes, until the door closed in its entirety.

"I'm giving you the name Gaster. …And I pray you don't suffer because of me."

A click followed, and blackness fell in its entirety on the corpse.


	2. Chapter 2

The lab of the Royal Scientist was in shambles.

At least, more so in shambles than how Dr. Richter usually left it. Even on its good days the lab was never "clean," but its weird, messy chaos was at least by Richter's design—a jumbled mess of equipment and notes that made sense only to Richter himself. That system had failed in its entirety. What faced Richter now was an entropic, dizzying spread of everything, _everywhere_.

The pipets had migrated to every far corner of the lab; his drawers and shelves had been hastily relabeled and relocated to minimize the walking he'd need to do to gather equipment. The centrifuge had started shrieking, and Richter didn't have the time to waste on diagnostics. He simply hoped it had no plans of cataclysmic failure anytime soon. The scientist himself was caught in a frenzy, flitting from one bench to the next in a frantic effort to monitor his dozen, simultaneous experiments all frothing and bubbling and beeping at once.

 _Microscopic analysis, cell fractionation, spectroscopy readings, column chromatography, in vitro cultures, magical imbuement_ —Richter had run out of feathers on his wing to tick all of them off. He simply juggled them all in his mind as he skirted between stations. No one experiment was particularly difficult, but they were the sort best done individually, with undivided attention, and across multiple trials. That…wasn't this.

A long, stark stretch of hallway loomed ahead of Richter. He stalked through it, a rat in a maze, shifting from one experiment to the next. "A fine mess, a fine mess this is! Rushing experiments, rushing everything, like some starry-eyed postdoc thinking he's on track to solve the world's crises in a week. Yes, that's all I am to Asgore. A miracle worker. Miracle workers don't have hip problems."

Richter stopped his hobbling. He slowed his pace, stared ahead to the lab bench thirty feet straight ahead. On it sat a chromatography column, nearly dripped dry. He'd all but forgotten about that, another _fine_ mess. He ought to add more buffer. He ought to collect the fraction samples. He ought to prepare the spectrophotometer to analyze—

The old bird let out a long-held breath. He blinked, and opened his eyes again with only a portion of the attention that had been burning there before. His neck twisted, surveying the mess of a lab with a sort of listless attention. It felt voyeuristic, watching so many things spiral out of control at once. Richter only shook his head, and focused his attention instead to the undisturbed exanimation room on his left. He took a single step toward it, another. Richter only stopped once the door filled his entire vision, blocking out the frothing mess of experiments running behind him.

He let out another small sigh and rapped a single, folded wing against the door. "Hello, Gaster." He cracked the room open, feeling a rush of cold air breeze past his face. He'd lowered the room's temperature to 20 degrees below normal, for the sake of preservation. It felt good after his hurrying about. He knocked a wing against the lone table inside. Its wheels rattled, and the bones atop its surface chattered in response. A greeting, almost.

"Still quiet, hmm? …Good, I like that." Richter moved past the skeleton. He scanned the shelves in back, patting a wing along the highest one until it clamped around a tin of glass slides. "Lab assistants are too chatty. Too opinionated. I fear Asgore might place a few of them—heh—underneath my wing if I don't hurry this along. You—you, I like."

Richter popped the top off and skimmed his feathers along the side-long microscope slides. He grunted in displeasure as his wing drew back coating a fine layer of dust—or dirt, most likely. No doubt from Asgore's reckless contamination of the lab.

"And what a fine mess I'm in as it is! You're curiously made. Curiously…complex. Not dust, far from it. Yes, you're fascinating, Gaster…" Richter's claws clacked on his way back to the examination table. He arced his neck over the silent body. "And very, very dead. Not an ounce of life in you. Though—who am I to say? I don't know what comprises a human life. I truly don't. I can't even guess. 100 years of wild, baseless attempts wouldn't put your life back in you. And that's the best I can do for you. Oh, he'd grow impatient with me-Asgore would. He wouldn't stand for it; it's a wonder he's not breathing down my neck right now. No patience in that monster."

Richter paused, letting silence fill the gap in which the skeleton might have answered him. He imagined a response instead—something agreeable, something sympathetic. Richter nodded, then knocked a wing against the table. "Say, what if I cast a small enchantment on you, hmm Gaster? Something telekinetic to get your bones rattling. The underground has its share of fine puppeteers—Asgore used to be fond of them. I'll bet I could find one up to the task, someone who'd dance your old bones about. Yes, yes, the King has brown-nosers aplenty. Someone would be your ventriloquist. You could shake out those achy joints, miserable lifeless lad you are."

Richter shut his beak, eyes suddenly blank. He grunted and turned away from the array of bones. "I…should work on my jokes." He hopped back to the door, tin pressed to his chest, and hooked his beak around the knob. "No, I've a good running joke here. A grand joke! This entire experiment. This whole… _assignment_ is one enormous joke _._ The King is pulling my leg—what good's a fool when he has me? Resurrect the dead? Ah! What a laugh…"

Richter shut the door with a clatter. He exhaled, slunk down, and examined the tin of slides in his grip. He'd been shaving off paper-thin slivers of bone all morning, mounting and sealing them to slides, figuring out the layers that made up human skeletal tissue. How many had he done before he ran out of slides? High 200's, at least. On top of everything else he'd orchestrated. All his good, tedious, disciplined work… Richter had realized hours back that it wouldn't deliver any news that the King wanted to hear. It wasn't until now that Richter found himself truly accepting his defeat. So he slumped against the wall, shut his eyes, and indulged himself in the frantic, humming sounds that wafted through the lab.

A slick _swish_ echoed off the walls just then. Richter jumped back, dropping the tin of slides. He took to flapping his wings at the sight of one of the King's attendants standing at the door. It was an elk of sorts, dressed head to toe in red. Her wide bulbous eyes scanned over the lab with curiosity. Richter honked, which startled the monster attendant to attention.

"Out! Get out! Out with you! You're not authorized—Oh you'll contaminate everything! Out, out out out outout."

The elk drew back from the entrance. Her hooves clacked, echoing in the hallway. "I-I'm…I'm here on the King's orders," she answered. Her voice lilted upward in question.

"Good! I have a message for him." Richter spread his wings wide, as if the encompass the entire lab space. He gestured aggressively to the area around him. "I'm resigning! I won't work on this project a minute longer. It's a fool's errand! Bones!? Bones tell me nothing about _life._ I have every experiment in the book running here; they tell me everything about the bones' composure and _nothing_ about playing god! Am I expected to just magic human life out of the air?! "

The elk crouched in on herself, face half buried in a crinkling sheet of paper she held. Only her eyes answered Richter, sparkling curiously. After a moment, she drew herself to full height again. A faint smile pulled at the edges of her lips, some budding, bubbling excitement that earned Richter's ire.

"…Funny you should say that." She twisted on her heel, and gestured for Richter to follow. "Come. The King wants you to see something."

"I-I have time-sensitive experiments running!" Richter hopped into the air and fluttered. His jaw tightened at the thought—he _had_ just resigned, so what did he care about the state of the experiments? "Everything will settle, and I'll have to re-centrifuge the ones that do, and I hardly trust that centrifuge to last another ten minutes—"

The elk stomped her hoof, which seemed to rip the breath right from Richter's throat. She set a hand to the main light switch by the door and ticked each of them off. In a rolling wave, the lab lights went dark.

"Asgore needs you. Come."

…

Richter followed the elk in agitated silence. He didn't spare a thought for the guards who welcomed him through the castle grounds, nor for the stomach-turning drop that paved the thin road to Asgore's throne room. He didn't bother asking the elk her name either; it was easier to detest her without one. Richter reserved all his attention for mentally calculating how much time and work he would lose because of the interruption.

The two of them paused by the entrance to Asgore's garden. It was the King's throne room, in reality, though it was littered with beds of flowers. Asgore just preferred to call it his garden; it sounded gentler.

"Asgore is inside." The elk took a step to the side. "I'm supposed to stay out here. Please—" She gestured to the door leading toward the garden.

Richter grunted his response, twisting his neck around so he could hook his beak on the doorknob. It stuck halfway, and Richter duly ignored the elk when she pushed in the rest of the way. He straightened his head, smoothed down his feathers, and took long, delicate steps into the room. The tickle of grass against his bare claws always bothered him.

Flowers. Everywhere. Richter pretended to indulge himself in the colorful patches, which were wilting brown in the impending cold, rather than acknowledge Asgore. It was a task to ignore the King. He took up so much space in such a small room, even crouched over with his back to Richter. Asgore knelt there, unmoving, unspeaking, though his ears twitched to attention as Richter's steps rustled the grass.

The doctor paused about ten feet shy of Asgore. He waited, intent on not being the one to start the conversation. Asgore had summoned him; Asgore could take the initiative—ideally by thanking Richter for his unending patience. Richter indulged himself in the thought; he straightened himself, kept his breathing steady against the damp, mulchy smell of pollen and dirt. He considered what amount of profuse, apologetic praise it would take from Asgore to make him change his mind about resigning.

The seconds ticked away in silence. Richter sank back to his usual, stooped posture. His feathers bristled, watery eyes probing deep into the King's hunched back. He maintained it, as if his indignation alone might will the King to turn around. It did not such thing. Asgore simply knelt there, as if frozen.

Richter clacked his beak, clacked it again, cleared his throat. He shuffled, muttered, then quickened the pace of his agitated feet. He trampled a small patch of pansies, which would have earned the King's attention on any normal day—but not now. It seemed like as good a dismissal as any, and Richter had every intention of turning on his heel and heading back to the lab. But as he turned, his annoyance flashed to anger, and his mouth opened of its own accord.

"Isn't this a warm welcome?" Richter spat. "You've dragged me away from important work—tests I will have to restart—for what? So I can pace about while you brood into your flowers? I told your elk girl I quit. I do! I'm not your toy. I'm not your wizard. I'm not here to suffer under your emotional fits. I never supported this…human genocide. You have none of my sympathy, and I've had a few centuries too many of this, so goodbye."

"Wait!"

Richter paused on his heel. He shuddered with the rush of his outburst, breathing thick and heart-pounding. He swung his neck around, finding that Asgore had tilted his head just a fraction in his direction. "Give me one good reason to wait."

"It—h-how are your experiments going, Richter? Any luck?"

Richter huffed and swung his head around. "Plenty well, from my perspective. I've got the chemical composition quite nearly figured out. What it does not tell me is how to resurrect the _dead_ , so I suppose 'useless' is the answer you're looking for."

Asgore didn't move now. He remained bowed, staring at the ground. One hand moved forward, but the King's back shielded Richter from seeing what he'd reached for. Richter bent his head around without luck. It must be small, whatever it was.

"I'm sorry to hear that." Asgore's words were weighed down with genuine regret. Richter huffed as guilt jabbed at his chest. He shook his few remaining feathers loose, but his anger had melted off him like snow from a warm rooftop.

"I…I, uh, set your hopes to this. I'm not blameless; I simply should have kept my beak shut. You've become…delicate, and I'm forever tactless. Kids and women softened you, which is not entirely your fault, Asgore."

Asgore shifted. He tilted his head back to Richter, eyes possessed by a glazed calm as he appraised his scientist. "Yes, I've softened. And yes, you're as unpleasant as ever."

Richter shrugged. He set a foot backwards. "Seems I am. Unpleasant and old. Yes, too old for this game anymore. There are plenty of shiny, bright new scientists in the underground who'd be glad to be your pet. I wish you all the luck."

"I did not dismiss you." An edge of iciness had entered Asgore's voice. Richter froze, and leaned back toward his king. Asgore inhaled again, though he didn't shift his body. "You say this isn't possible with just bones, fine. I recognize that. What if you had…more? …A human. A live one. Could you do it then?"

Richter bristled. He hopped back, keen to a tension that had doused the modest garden. He felt colder, suddenly, and meeker. Richter didn't blink as the King stared into him. He heard the faint, shivering rustle of something from the ground.

"I uh…I don't have a human life to study. So what good are hypotheticals?"

Asgore shifted now. His whole body tilted, weight redistributing. He put one foot underneath himself, pressed his palm into the dirt, and pushed himself standing. The motion came with a wobble, a weakness in his legs. The King, large as he was, seemed smaller than usual. He shuffled aside, a shameful action; his eyes stayed low, his body hunched. Richter watched the sudden shift in the King's body language with apprehension. His attention didn't linger on Asgore for long though, not once the King had truly stepped aside.

A trident, buried into the mulch. Asgore had concealed the large, golden tool with his body. It now shimmered passively in the faint tricklings of light from the rood. Strong, stained at its tips with dirt.

All three prongs were wedged deep into the earth, but two straddled the thin neck of something…small. The tiny thing's head was gated on one side of the massive weapon. Its body was trapped on the other side, where its sinewy arms clenched tight around the prongs locked over its neck. The hands had gone white, cold and strained as they pulled against the golden bars. A delicate, powder blue dress covered the rest of its body. A small white bow at the collar had been stabbed through with the trident, loose, unraveling… The rest of the dress moved in a flutter, as if caught by the wind, while the little thing pinwheeled its legs in the air. It spoke only in squeaks—shuddering, quiet, constricted noises, as if too afraid to speak louder with the trident across its neck. Dozens of dark braids haloed its head, each tied at the end with a colorful ribbon. They were beautiful, and neat—someone loved the child, to tie each little braid with such careful attention.

"A…fifth?" Richter asked.

Asgore glanced down at his work, only for a moment. He fixed his eyes back to Richter. "I'd heard rumors…but I didn't think…" The child let out another small squeak. Asgore flinched, eyes shutting forcefully. "I wasn't _expecting_ …half an hour ago, she…Is it—it's good timing, I suppose. It's good timing, Dr. Richter. To think you'd have quit otherwise. "

The girl braced her legs against the flower-strewn garden, stretching her head until she faced Richter. Brown—wide, glistening brown eyes looked into his. Aware, terrified, and casting out a silent plea for help to the old doctor. Her jaw trembled, and her eyes didn't dare to blink. Richter could only swallow dryly, and hop away from the little human. He stared instead at the wall, shaken. "She…doesn't like that. Trapping her like that-It seems cruel."

Asgore winced, though Richter couldn't see it. He heard only the swish of rustling flower stems as the little girl violently shook her head. "No, no I don't like—I-I—" She swallowed, eyes going wider as her exposed neck brushed against the trident. Her face twisted in a fresh onslaught of terrified tears. "I-I-I wanna go home. I don't like this I don't like this anymore. Let me go. Please I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my _mommy_!"

The King crouched eye-level with her, drawing back when she squealed and sobbed harder. He watched her flailing legs with something like pain. "You cannot go home. Humans who fall down here…they cannot go home. But, you don't need to be afraid. This man—his name is Dr. Richter—he's been tasked with saving you—all the humans who've fallen down here."

" _No!"_ Her wide, dark eyes appraised Asgore with unblinking horror. Tears coalesced at their edges and trickled down. Her skin, Richter noted, was much darker than the bleached bones he had left to study, flushed, slick with sweat, filled with tremors of life. What had…Chara's skin looked like? How had it moved when they were alive? Did they ever shiver like this?

Asgore shifted his attention to Richter. "She's yours. Whatever tests you need to run. Whatever things you need to study to know how human life works—take her. You have permission to do…anything"

Richter blinked, finding his mouth too dry for speech. He shook his head to find his thoughts. "Anything?" He moved his sharp eyes from the child to Asgore. "You say that as if…as if I have plans to dice her up."

Asgore looked to his throne as he spoke, his voice low. "And I'm granting you permission, if you needed to."

Richter scoffed, burying the shiver that racked his body. "Forget what I said about how you've gone soft. You're cold as ever."

"Desperate, more like."

"What a lovely excuse, childslayer." Richter took a tentative step forward. The little girl froze as she noticed his approach. Her writhing legs went limp against the ground, filthy dress hiked up to her knees. They were skinned, her knees, criss-crossed with slits and bleeding thin streams of red. That was right, living humans were full of bleeding red.

"I don't think you can lift her. I'll carry her to the lab, Richter, just as I carried—"

Richter raised a wing to silence Asgore. He stared directly into the little girl as he spoke. "I'm not taking her into the lab, Asgore. That's a pretty bold request to make of someone who just quit."

A shift came about Asgore's eyes. The soft regret hardened like steel; they were harsh, unflinching. "This is an order, not a request."

Richter met Asgore's gaze with a challenge. He raised his right wing in silence, and an eking, thick green energy poured out from his feathers. The magic evaporated off in steady streams, wafting like steam, soaking outward.

"I am _not_ taking her into the lab. Because it's crueler than what is necessary. That does not mean I'm disobeying—I'm not so senile that I cannot recognize a demand from my king."

Richter gestured toward the child, and his drifting aura followed the direction. It found her right leg, tangling and growing up over her body. She shrieked at the contact; she yanked and pulled in a small, futile effort to escape the magic's touch. The trident didn't budge; she only pressed her hair deep into the dirt and streaked it filthy. Her strength bled out of her body, until she froze with only the silent tears dripping down her cheeks. She only watched in growing horror as the fog encompassed her whole body.

Richter cocked his head to the King, appraising the blank intrigue on the monster's face. "You look surprised, Asgore. Have you forgotten I'm a magical creature like you?" Richter swept his wing out, and the fog entombed Asgore's prisoner. "Rusty yes, but I've got a magical gambit I'm quite proud of. This trick is one of my best. Don't expect me to use it often," Richter shivered, eyes set in keen focus to his glowing wing. "It takes exhausting amounts of magic, though it's a fair trade. Hypersensitive analysis—tells me just about everything I could gather from weeks of grueling tests. Personally, I'm more fond of the leisureliness of lab work." He cocked his head toward Asgore. "But it would be cruel to shackle her down against cold metal alongside Gaster, hmm?"

Asgore stared, before offering a slow nod. He cleared his throat, embarrassed. "…I-if I can assist you somehow—if there's anything I can do to help your magic along…" Asgore whispered. He interlocked his fingers, ears twitching as the child's cries grew more panicked.

"No, just stand there. And don't talk. I'd hate to have to redo this." Richter raised his other wing, which had begun to leak a dark, smoky liquid. It frothed outward, almost gaseous, until Richter's entire wing vanished in a murky cloud of darkness.

Then he directed the dark wing to the ground. The cloud collapsed, contouring to his feathers in a slick, oily coating. It ran down in beads, like rain drops down a window, until pooling into a single point at the very edge of Richter's wing.

 _Drip._ A single bead of ink hit the ground, and it exploded outward, as if running through unseen veins, staining the ground in lines and wide loops. Cursive writing grew out of it, impossibly small, twisting and weaving into a thousand lines of information. Another drop hit the ground, another, another, each expanding on the self-directed writing, and flowed over the ground. The notes ran across the dirt, overtop flowers, toward the walls. Words sprung to life: numbers, thousands upon millions of datapoints spawned from the analytical green fog enveloping the girl. The ink ran up the stone walls. It crawled along the ceiling, snaking and weaving so as not to overwrite itself. Golden flowers were poisoned with wilting veins of black; tulips shrunk on themselves as if weighed down by the inky parasite. Asgore watched the display in quiet awe. He spun as the data wrapped along the other wall, printing itself faster than eyes could follow.

It took all of thirty seconds for every surface of the throne room to tattoo itself in Richter's ink. Until all at once, it stopped. Richter's feathers had dripped dry, and he paused for just a moment to breathe before he drew his other wing back in. The leaking green fog dissipated. The girl lost her aura. She appeared no different—no marks on her skin, no disturbance to her clothes; the trident shackling her neck to the ground hadn't budged so much an inch. She'd fallen silent in shock. Now, only Richter's panting broke the silence.

Richter pulled himself back to full height, eyes heavy, and nodded toward the girl. "If you would be so kind as to…not step on any of the writing. Everything that has written itself out here—it's not saved anywhere else. I would appreciate if you didn't smudge it."

Asgore drew his attention away from the small, slanted writing that now dominated everything. He looked only to Richter, overcome with a sudden anxiety. "Is that…what you just did—is that all you need?" His furtive eyes glanced quickly to the girl. "You…need to run tests, don't you? Take samples, or else—"

Richter shrugged. "It's all I'm going to get out of her. That little stunt—it simulates everything I could do with lab equipment and time. I have more data than I could hope to process." He spread his wings across the room, gesturing to the miles of minuscule writing. "Analyzing it—that may take some time. But the tests are done. And so is she…I imagine."

"But you—?"

"I do not need her anymore, Asgore, if that's what you mean to ask."

The words seemed to sting Asgore. His lips parted a fraction, eyes going wide and glassy with poorly-concealed surprise. He looked back to the girl he'd pinned into the dirt. She'd gone limp, only watching him. Staring, eyes stained with tears, into Asgore. Both her dark little hands still grasped at the trident prongs, but she made no further effort to yank it free. Asgore took a step toward her, and clasped one powerful hand around the trident's grip.

The King froze in that position. Richter, after a moment of silence, found himself looking away.

"I wanna go home," the little voice whispered. It was nearly inaudible, but it rang clear as day without any other noise to drown in. A shiver of wind swept through the room, along with the comfortable rustle of flowers. "I wanna…I-I wanna go home."

"This…can be your home, child. Your new home. We can save you, in time. I-I'll save you."

There came a dampened, metal shifting. The noise tugged, and ended with a soft _shing_ as the trident worked its way out of the dirt.

"M-mommy..." A squeak, a swallow. " _T-toriel,_ please help… I-I change my mind. I wanna go back. Toriel, please…"

A pause. A thick, tense moment of hesitation. Richter stared at the wall, beak clamped shut as he heard the child's cries dissolve into wordless blubbering. The child knew the Queen…how coincidental.

A plunge.

The squelch of metal breaking through something wet, something soft.

A tiny, tiny yelp.

And silence.

Richter gave a shuddering inhale, suddenly aware that he had stopped breathing. He shook his stiff, numb feathers, moved his feet that now buzzed with static. His wobbling steps took him to the patch of flowers where the writing had begun. He stared down into the dirt, intent only on the information staining the ground. Richter followed the track of black writing, moving with it, absorbing it, blocking out everything save for the information he'd painted on the walls. Black, he paid attention only to the black staining the ground.

He paused at a single spread of datapoints. Richter cocked his head, trying to process why the edges had smudged. He blinked, shook the ringing from his head, and focused. They'd been…overwritten. A senseless outcropping of red had bled all over them. It was…annoyance at first, that Richter felt. Messy, messy…ruining his data. He cocked his head to the right, and looked at the thing that had bled all over his neat, careful data.

It didn't move anymore. Didn't flush with heat and sweat and terror. It just sat there, much like Gaster did, curiously small under the massive weight of the trident that now pierced its stomach.

Richter looked back down at the trail of notes. His eyes had blurred, for some reason. And so the numbers meant nothing. He stared, and stared, and stared, willing his vision to come back. Asgore moved to his right; the King lifted the little thing off the ground and carried it away. Delicate—how like Asgore, to move so delicately. Yes, the King had become so delicate. So soft.

Richter glanced to his wings, blinked the weird, foreign wetness from his eyes. He watched them, the shifting in his feathers, like wind passing through them. He was cold, yes, but there was no wind to speak of. Just a tremor wracking the loose, old feathers. The data had disappeared from his mind. He only investigated himself, puzzled beyond reason at his own plucked limbs.

How long, he wondered…

How long had his wings been trembling like that?


	3. Chapter 3

The king's flowers were dead by nightfall.

And none of them had died naturally. Not with wilting petals, browning leaves, and frost crystals crawling in spider webs through their stems. These had been killed into a field of dolls with Richter's ink drying in their infected veins and their petals stiffening into plastic. The moisture had been wrung from their bodies. Their leaves had been tattooed with poisonous tracks of black. Their roots had died into waxy, burrowing pedestals. They made for sad company, even if they'd died beautiful.

Richter had emptied out his lab's store of paper. A column of off-white parchment sat just outside the throne room now, stacked as tall as Richter stood. He took a few sheets at a time into the garden, a pen as well, and followed the slow progression of notes he'd created across the ground, across the walls, across the flowers. He'd filled quite nearly a hundred pages in the hours that had passed, covering perhaps a tenth of the total room.

The ground and walls—they were easy. Ink ran over stone etchings and mulchy slates; Richter could copy those readings over with ease. But the flowers were…different. They were difficult in death. On carnations, the writing spiraled inward with the natural twirl of the petals. There was no staggering to the words, no gaps. They spun to the centers like water down a funnel. On the violets, the words read themselves out in lines. Each petal acted as a page in a book, stringing one to the next. These curled outward, peeled and shorn, by the weight of the ink. The hyacinths were complicated; words twisted in serpentine down their Christmas-bauble petals.

The asters though—Richter liked those. Each petal was distinct, thin and long, sporting a single line of text. Richter plucked them one at a time, reading, copying, discarding. Their petals blanketed the ground in his wake, leaving naked bright stamen jutting from their stems. They were dead anyway; it wasn't as if keeping their petals changed that fact. They'd have died soon too, as autumn edged toward cold, toward frost. It was the nature of flowers to die. There would always be more.

Richter clamped his beak lightly over an aster petal, one of the few petals left on the flower, and one of the few flowers left in the patch of asters. He lowered it onto his parchment just above his current line, then adjusted his pen to pick up on his writing. His thin beady eyes moved between petal and paper as he copied down its ink verbatim.

He glanced back to the near-naked flower and huffed a chalky laugh. "Ah, save the look for someone else, flower. If you're searching for pity—being plucked naked like that—I'm not one to bite." Richter shivered to puff up the few clinging feathers on his old neck. Most of it was bare skin and stunted, fuzzy plumage. "We're a pair, the two of us. Worked to death, aye-to baldness, by the king's fantastical delusions." Richter scratched furiously at the paper, noting with ire that his pen's ink was running dry. He brushed the petal away, bent down, and plucked the next one to copy. "I've a theory, flower. Want to hear? I suspect Asgore's been draining my youth right from my feathers. 's the only explanation I have for how he maintains that childlike naivety."

Richter paused, staring down the mute flower. "That…was a joke. The king's a fool, I mean to say, which is not something I can say to him. So I say it to you." He squinted harder at the currently-plucked petal. It bore a long string of numbers, which demanded Richter's complete attention if he didn't want to miscopy something. "Something of a hobby I've developed: griping about the king to small, mute things he's killed." Richter stopped then, clacked his beak. "Well…I suppose I killed you, little flower. Yes, the blood is on Asgore's hands, but you—"

Richter's wanton musings fell silent. He studied the numbers on the plucked petal, blinked a few times to ensure his eyes weren't deceiving him. The data printed on the flower betrayed a strange, sudden spike in magical aura. The numbers bloated upward: dozens to hundreds to thousands of units. Richter felt his blood thrum harder inside his head as he wrote. His wings adopted a slight tremble. Magic. Magic in a…human.

"That…is…Well that can't—oh. … _Oh."_ He nipped a feather from his wing and stuck it into the stack of notes to mark the page. Then he peddled backwards, stepping on dead flowers in his wake. They crunched like glass beneath his toes.

"As—Asgore! I've found something!"

Richter burst out of the throne room to find the King's same elk attendant leaning against the brick, arms crossed and bleary eyes blinking off sleep at the disturbance. She looked Richter up and down. He'd started hopping from foot to foot, which only built on the confusion creasing her brow.

"The king—tell me—where's he gone?"

The elk stood up straight. She rose a whole foot taller than Richter. "Back to his house. Hours ago. I'm standing guard now instead, so if you need anything I'm supposed to—"

"I need _Asgore._ I'll drag his fluffy tail out of bed if I must. What time is it? No matter. I'll be damned if he sleeps through this. You!—take a break. On second thought, do not. Guard the throne room. The flowers in there are very important."

With that, Richter took off in long, gangly, hopping steps. The elk watched him vanish down the corridor, still shaking sleep from her mind. She rubbed her eyes and focused. …Flowers? Sure the King loved his flowers, but what did Richter care for them?

She crept to the still-open door. When she peered inside, she had to bite down the small, strangled noise that rose in her throat. Goopy, black, wilted petal shards spread like broken glass across the ground. The room was dense with a cold, clawing magic. It pricked at her, stung against her fur, and she recoiled from the room, shocked into silence.

She'd helped attend to Asgore's flowers that morning. The aggressively-vibrant throne room, overrun with flowers as if they were weeds, clogging the air with the heady smell of mulch and pollen. Bright and alive and _thriving_ …and she'd only stepped out once when the human came along.

What had happened in the meantime—she didn't know. But it was hardly nightfall now,

and all the King's flowers were dead.

…

Two weeks had passed by the lab, drenched in darkness, drenched in silence. Richter's dilutions and fractionations had all settled. The error light on the centrifuge had blipped on and off in isolation. Gaster's skeletal body had rested, peacefully undisturbed, on its metal bed.

When Richter did edge his way back into the lab, it was with a manuscript of notes six inches thick. He paused, breath held, and patted about on the wall for the light switches. The bulbs overhead shuddered to life, one by one at his touch. Caustic bright light flooded down, harsh on the white surfaces, and Richter let out a single snort.

"A mess. An absolute mess. I'll be damned if all my samples aren't caked to the inside of cuvettes right now. Oh I hope I didn't leave anything important uncapped."

Despite his mutterings, Richter paid no mind to the spread of experiments littering the benchtops. He hopped straight toward the examination room, whose door was still clamped shut. Richter locked his beak around the knob and threw it open with ease. Blanketed in darkness, Richter allowed the light from the main lab to flood in. In turn, the icy chill of the examination room flowed out over him. He shivered, but brushed it off. He had eyes only for his test subject.

"Hello Gaster. Still silent, hmm? Oh don't feel bad about it; your human friend spoke plenty. Well she didn't. Her body did. I've quite the spread of analytical data on her—on her life, most importantly. The key is magic, Gaster, not chemistry. Peculiar, I think. Humans are so chemically put together; to think the most important part of them was based in magic. Not unlike a monster life at all, no. My theories hold water, Gaster. They hold water."

The skeleton gave no response. Its head had tilted to the side once more, but otherwise its bones didn't stir. Richter ducked to a cabinet alongside Gaster. He pulled out odd beakers and white bottles, sporting labels of illegible chicken scratch. He set his notes down blindly on the desk, placing it just shy of his ever-growing hoard of bottles.

Richter hopped out of the examination room. He traced a path along the walls of the larger lab space, stopping at odd cabinets to pull out another few bottles at a time. He muttered to himself as he worked. His mental checklist grew steadily shorter as Richter came across the last few ingredients he had in mind, now awkwardly clamped in his wings.

"A mess, an utter mess this lab is! Strange how I don't care anymore."

There was a bounce in his step as he moved. Richter wobbled under the weight of his new acquirements, and paused by the door right as he heard heavy, plodding footsteps approach from the other side. Richter craned his neck around. He nodded once at the sight of Asgore paused anxiously at the doorway.

"Come in, come in. Oh don't mind the mess—this is unusual. I'm usually the picture of cleanliness. No that's a lie as well, but this is unusual."

Asgore cracked a thin smile. He ducked consciously to avoid hitting the doorframe with his horns. "You're…chipper today."

"Over-caffeinated. I warned you it gets me rustled." Richter continued with his bouncing toward the examination room. Asgore followed, moving around islands of lab benches and stools. "I've gotten precious little sleep with transcribing all these notes. And examining them. And the magic had left me drained to start. And sleep has been a burden anyway—strange how I've forgotten, from the war—that way in which dying, screaming things like to needle their way into your dreams. 'Rest in peace!' Ah, seems she can, and it's fair I shan't."

Asgore jerked to attention at this. His hand closed convulsively, a muscle memory twitch. "I uh…I know what you mean, Richter." His eyes found hold on a canister of CO2 shackled to the wall. Asgore stared at it, unblinking. "It's funny, when you put it that way. But uh…I've been thinking, Richter, a-and I'm sorry."

Richter had vanished into the examination room. Asgore followed on tentative heels. He hung back, watching from a distance as Richter flipped through the manuscript on his desk.

Asgore swallowed before continuing. "Sorry…for being so unreasonable with you. So spontaneous. For making you see things that should have just been my burden to bear. I've been treating you more as a miracle-worker, than a frie—"

"Oh don't say 'friend', Asgore. We're not schoolyard chums." He leaned over a page, drew back, grabbed a bottle from the collection of 40 or so that he'd grabbed, and poured some of it into a beaker. Richter crouched eye level to verify how much he'd poured before tipping the components into a larger bowl at his side. "This world is full of rotten things, whether I see them or not. Would I be any less reprehensible for clearing out of the room while you killed that girl? No. Humans die. And monsters die. Sometimes, because we've killed the other. Humans killed my mother; I never let it get me down for long."

"I'm…sorry."

Richter tilted his head up, a fat white bottle still clamped in his mouth. "For what? My mother, or your slave-driving me?"

Asgore's face heated up at that. "I—both!"

"Oh don't be. She was a nag. Awful thing to say about someone who took a bullet for you, hmm?"

The King dropped a fist onto the nearest shelf. Its contents rattled in protest. Richter quieted, and set his bottle of goopy blue liquid down. "Don't toy with me, Richter. I am… _genuinely_ trying to apologize to you. You've invited me down here for a chat, yes? Well I'm initiating the conversation, and I am _conceding. …_ You could…at least respect that."

Richter reached for another bottle, a blue-capped one. He spiraled his neck around, clenched the cap with his beak, and unscrewed it with a single yank backward. "I invited you down here for a demonstration, Asgore. Not a chat."

"Demon—" Asgore's eyes flickered to the skeleton resting on the examination table to his right. Sharp anxiety ate across his features.

"God knows I've been fantasizing of getting a proper apology from you. Somehow I prefer the fantasies—your apologies always leave me feeling…irked. You give them as if your only goal is to make others feel sorry for you. Work on that." He measured out another 100 or so milliliters of the new substance he'd uncapped, a thin, stringy yellow chemical, before dumping it in with the rest. "But don't work on it now. Stand there quietly and watch."

"You're…are you… _done?_ " Asgore breathed. He edged away from the skeleton on the table, as if suddenly afraid of it.

"What do you think I've been doing these two weeks?"

Asgore threw both his arms out. "What'd I—I did not know _what_ to think because I have not _heard_ from you, Richter! You came in once prattling about a spike in the magic readings, then never again!"

Richter bobbed his head in a nod, then reached for another loosely-capped bottle. "Hmm, yes. That sounds right. Visiting you more would have meant leaving my notes in the garden to come find you. I didn't like leaving them alone with your elk-girl, Asgore. What if she were to touch something?"

"Rowena? She—it—how is that an excuse?"

Richter shrugged. "This feels hypocritical, coming from the man who dragged me out of my element, without warning, to watch a human die." He dropped a now-empty canister into the biohazard wastebin by his feet, then shot Asgore the slightest of smiles. "Now I've dragged you out of your element, without warning, to watch a human live."

There was a visceral reaction in the king. A shiver rolled down his spine; his breath hitched, and the sharp inhale that followed gave way to a coughing fit. He opened his eyes to found he'd bowed eye-level with the skeleton. He locked gazes with it, lost in the hollow blackness of its sockets. It bore into him even as he stood up at full height again, as if following him.

Asgore refused to speak, so Richter decided to fill the humming silence as he worked at the stash of containers he'd collected. "I haven't worked with some of these in years—the magic components, that is. All the bottles with blue caps are magic-based. I'd grown tired of that science. Tried focusing my efforts more on physical chemistry like the humans do. Slow work, so slow. I missed the speed and ease of mixing magic. To think I'd snubbed it once."

Asgore eyed the bloating goop with concern. It had turned steely gray, though its hue shifted wildly with each ingredient Richter added. "And that… _that_ is what you think can…bring the child back?"

Richter bobbed a nod. "It's a careful reconstruction of the information I got off the flowers. I've refined it down as best as I can. There are blindspots—the life will have to be fueled magically, not chemically, now that the body is dead. And the soul—like I said—we don't have that. It shouldn't be vital though. I daresay I've read myths about humans without souls—usually not a good portrayal, but they're only myths. But we don't have a choice in the matter. There are substitutes in the formula. A 'prosthetic soul' if you please. I can list off what parts of this mixture fill in for it."

Asgore only nodded, face drawn and pale. "I…trust you, Richter." Asgore passed a hand over the unmoving skeleton. He didn't dare touch it as he traced over its shape in the air. "…But this—why this one? I gave you this one to study but…if you're _ready_. If you have something that'll work…I-I still have the girl's body. I just…I promised to her—"

Richter clacked his beak in annoyance. Asgore retracted his hand from the skeleton as if he'd been scolded, wide eyes now trained to Richter. Richter gestured aggressively toward the skeleton on the table. "You really don't listen to me. It's the _bones_ , Asgore, the human bones that are stable. We need organic and self-sustaining. The girl you just killed—her body still has plenty of rotting to do before it hits equilibrium. I don't think it'll be too much fun coming back to a body that's a stinking, rotting mess for a few months, minimum."

Asgore didn't answer to this. He only nodded once more, eyes still locked to his victim's. "And you… _do_ think this will work?"

"It's this or nothing," Richter slurred as he used his beak to overturn the final bottle on the bench. The concoction churning in front of him turned a deep purple. It frothed at the edges, and adopted a dim glow. A noise, like howling, wafted from it.

Curiosity clamped tight around Asgore's heart. Anxiety and hope made it pound faster as he approached. The room was large enough to hold the three of them, but not comfortably. The walls pressed in against Asgore as he watched Richter lift the mixing pot of life he'd brewed.

"Now," Richter gave his right wing a sharp inward twist. The bones on the bench snapped into position, just as Richter had laid them out two weeks earlier. The sudden movement made Asgore flinch; he appraised them with a muted horror that hadn't been in his face before. Richter watched the bones as well, though he only let out a chalky laugh. "I suppose this is my last chance to call you Gaster, hmm? Tell us your real name, once you've come to your senses. The King would appreciate it."

Asgore opened his mouth to say something, but shut it compulsively as Richter tipped the bowl one-handed over the skeleton. The sludge doused its skull first, running down the neck, over the ribcage, across both arms. As soon as the slurry made contact, it found a life of its own. It rolled and rippled over the bones, dug deep into the skull and crawled in waves over its form. It reminded Asgore of rain-slick mud eating whatever had been dropped into it. He watched the bones disappear under the sucking blanket of murky brown. Nothing remained but the mound, burying bones once more.

There came a _crack_ from the mixture. The sludge hardened instantaneously, sucking itself to the well-defined contours of the body's bones. It looked like a new skeleton, a denser, darker one built entirely out of dirt. The thing shook, then vibrated, then glowed. Asgore found himself stumbling back to the wall. Richter, on the other hand, hopped inward.

Brighter, brighter it got, waxing from brown to magenta, until Asgore had to look away from the pulsing fire it cast. It still singed against his eyelids. From the scuttling clack of feet to his left, Asgore guessed that even Richter had begun to back away.

"If this fails, by the way, the rebound might kill us. Hypothetically. It's crossed my mind."

Richter's words though were drowned in the building screech that had wrung from the bones' vibration. Asgore willed himself to believe he misheard as he clamped his paws over his ears.

Then, like a vacuum in space, the shrieking bled away. It left a hollow, churning hum in its wake, and Asgore eased his hands away from his head. The light dissipated too, until only stars danced in Asgore's vision. He cracked his eyes open and saw the sludge, now black and chalky, slip off the bones, onto the table, and run down its metal legs to pool on the floor. He didn't waste long watching the concoction. His eyes stayed fixed on the body; he didn't blink. Richter too leaned in, and neither of them dared to breathe.

A light—a fire—two of them, ignited inside the little creature's skull. It convulsed, skull snapping onto spine, limbs stringing against its body. Small threads of white shot along its form, wrapping and tying and binding the bones into place. It rattled, bones jangling, table shivering in its slippery pool of waste chemical. Then, the seizing stopped. Its bones loosened, and the two pinpricks of fire restarted inside its sockets. They flickered right, flickered left, then the skull itself blinked.

 _Blinked_

A shuddering exhale broke from Asgore's mouth, and the skeleton shifted its glowing eyes to the noise. The king fell to his knees, all the better since his legs had become too weak to stand on. He put a cautious paw out, and felt a fullness thrum through his heart as he pressed his palm to the small boy's arm bone. The boy didn't pull back; he didn't even flinch. So Asgore went farther. He eased his hand beneath the boy's back ( _ribcage, spine)_ and lifted him into a sitting position. The head turned to him, freezing the breath in Asgore's throat until the firefly lights of eyes crinkled with a purely-tooth grin.

"You…you're alive," Asgore breathed. His palms trembled against its tiny frame, which drew the child's strange eyes. The grin dropped from the boy's face, and he now pressed a bony hand to Asgore's fur out of curiosity. "Oh child. I'm so….I-I'm so…" Asgore heaved another shuddering breath. He collected himself, eyes dropping for a moment to the floor, and spoke again. "You must be…so frightened of me right now. You should be. But I promise I won't hurt you. Ever again. I-it's you, right? I haven't forgotten your name. Tell me your name, s-so I can know it's really you."

The boy tilted his skull down to Asgore, considering the question, then raised his eyes to Richter. Richter had frozen where he stood, eyes wide to the animated thing on his lab bench.

The skeleton raised his arms, moved his hands in a few, odd formations.

Asgore waited, watched, breath held. The boy repeated the hand movements, which Asgore realized with clawing anxiety meant nothing to him. "Is that—oh, maybe you can't speak. Not yet. Getting used to a new body. Just nod your head yes if you understand; your name is Lucas." _Lucas._ It stung. The small boy with long, stringy hair falling to his shoulders. An untied shoelace, chest forward, challenging Asgore. _My name is Lucas and I'm gonna beat you up to get home!_ That shoelace…Asgore had been afraid the boy might trip on it and hurt himself. "You told me that when we met. You're Lucas, right?"

The boy looked back down to Asgore, whose face had twisted in pleading. Slowly, solemnly, he shook his head.

Asgore swallowed, and then muttered, "You…are though. You're Lucas." The king grabbed him by the shoulders, claws now, not paws, and gripped him tight. Fear sparked in the small boy's glowing eyes as Asgore stared him dead on. "47 years ago, I killed you. In the spring. You…you trampled some of my daisies, when we fought. Lucas, I swore I wouldn't forget—I memorized every detail so you'd…you'd live on."

A sharp jerk; the boy yanked his right shoulder free of the king's grip. His shoulder blade sliced, and it stung. Asgore pulled back a few feet, ears ringing.

Richter, in response, hopped a step forward. He placed a wing against the cold metal table, and waited until the child looked his way.

"What, child—what do you think your name is?" Richter asked. His face was unreadable, but whatever confidence had been brewing there had now vanished. A blank slate, a hesitant one.

The skeleton dropped his eyes. He froze, consumed in thought, then looked back up. Not to Asgore, but to Richter, and his mouth split into a smile.

"Gaster."


End file.
